Hello writers and readers!

I recently started reading “The Institute” by Stephen King. Here’s a synopsis from Amazon for those unfamiliar:

In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

Sounds good, right?! As soon as it was available in my local family-owned bookstore, I hopped on down to grab it… and got the last copy! I’m a huge Stephen King fan, so I couldn’t wait for this one. Plus, it’s spooky season… what better than a thriller?

I finally sat down to dig into this juicy 560 page beast and… I’m on page 5 and faced with a problem. Maybe a small thing, maybe not. Here it is: The main character cashes a plane voucher and pays an Uber driver upon arrival to the destination.

Anyone else see the problem here?

Plane vouchers are not changeable for cash, and Uber drivers are paid exclusively and automatically via the app.

Okay, yeah, these are little things. But why do they bother me so much? I’m able to suspend disbelief for fantasy stories with dragons flying every which way, but this voucher/Uber combo is killing me.

What if this were a fantasy story? Or a romance? Would I be faced with this same issue, or would I be able to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story? I think it comes down to the placement of the items. Say, for instance, a heroine in a romance cashes her plane voucher and pays her Uber driver directly in her climactic rush to her lover. These things would probably be blips on my radar because I’d be so invested in the story. Unfortunately, on page 5 of any book, I’m still trying to get invested. So, these seemingly little things stand out more than they might have otherwise.

So, writers and readers, what do you think? How and when can YOU suspend disbelief? Do certain authors or genres get a pass? Sound off below!